After a newspaper profile of the “looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Peters, otherwise known as Clavicular, went viral last month, many critics focused on how divorced his nihilistic quest for beauty—he’d call it “sexual market value”—was from any pursuit of women, relationships, or even sex. I was especially flummoxed by this sad man because I had just immersed myself in The Intimate Animal , a new book by the evolutionary biologist Justin R. Garcia on intimacy’s starring role in perpetuating our